The road less travelled
by idioticonion
Summary: Billy makes a deal. Set after Act III, including Dollhouse pre-season-1


**The road less travelled**

It's not about power.

Despite what you might think, it's not about fortune or fame, or the god damn worship of the crowd. It's not about the fear. Nor even about the sense of belonging.

It's about despair.

You see, all this - the trappings of the scientist, wearing the red and the black, two reflective discs instead of eyes - this was merely the badge of my ambition. What I wanted was - hell, I don't even know what I wanted. Some sense of achievement? Not for myself, oh no. I had this sort-of vision of me as the antihero, in my labcoat and goggles. I had this image of the rebel anarchist, the one that "the people", the little guy, looked up to. I had this Technicolor video in my mind, right up there on an iMax screen, where I towered above the world and made it…

Safe?

A better place?

Less of a mess, anyway. I've read my history. And oftentimes, our supposed "rulers" are merely puppets - guys who chase their tails, distract, play to the media. From Nixon onward - no, from way before - we had them. Tin pot dictators, little Hitlers. Even Lincoln had his faults.

I was so, so naïve.

And then, as suddenly as it had began, everything was drenched in blood. I was a symphony in scarlet, an emblem, a flashing stop sign. I was a member of a brotherhood, an Evil League, who were in disarray, who were merely another set of puppets with their strings being pulled, an army of monstrous marionettes who danced to the tune of an unknown puppetmaster.

I discovered who was calling the tune only two weeks into my tenure. And by then, it was way too late. I'd signed in my own heart's blood, a mafia-esq oath. The only way out was obliteration.

So, like I said: Despair.

And then I met _her_.

She approached me one day, on the street, bold as daylight, bright as a Styrofoam cup and twice as false. Her smile was an orthodontist's dream, her accent a vocal-coach's nightmare. This lady drew me in like a siren with her whispered, honeyed words and she played on my weakness.

My weaknesses, for they are many.

"I have a proposition for you, William," she said, silky smooth and smiling. She poured tea and slide a china cup across the table towards me. The steam rose into the air and disappated while my hands twitched, unable to keep still.

"Or should I say, Dr Horrible?" The lady added, with the barest ghost of a smile.

I regarded her with some distain. I'd heard of her and her cabal of so-called scientists. I was even acquainted with a few of them. Personality transplants, brain scans, telepathy, brain washing - it wasn't much use to me in my work. As if you could remove a human brain through a skull-zipper and throw it in a wash tub! As if you could ever get a mind really clean.

"Five years of your life," she said. Her words came so easily, so brazenly, so seductively.

Not that I'd know anything about seduction.

"Miss DeWitt-" I interrupted.

"Billy," she said, with practiced kindness. "May I call you Billy?"

My eyes narrowed. My heart seemed to shrink, Grinch-like, beneath my ribs.

Again, her lips twitched, as though she were amused by me. "Let's not beat about the bush," she said. "Your work… interests us. And at the moment with your… condition… you lack focus. Give us five years and we will clear your thoughts, allow you to progress in the areas you choose with the full funding of the Rossum Corporation at your disposal."

"What about the League?" I asked. It was a reasonable question.

"Oh dear," she said, with a one-note chuckle. "You really think they feature at all?"

This gave me some pause. It had been a long time since anyone surprised me. I thought the League's influence had spread far and wide. "Wolfram and Hart?" I let the question hang in the air.

She shook her head. "Mr-, William. You have to understand that we are a global enterprise. Such… parochial concerns do not interest us. You, however, do."

"Five years of oblivion?" I said, almost to myself. By now, by this stage, I welcomed it. The supernatural tendrils of Wolfram and Hart, the squabbling of the Heroes and Villains, they had left me weary.

They left the shell of me weary.

The core of me, the part that was Billy, the part that used to smile at a webcam and babble inanely about heists and Bad Horse, the part of me that would appear with bruises and broken bones, that part of me was in tears. That part of me had been crying for six months.

That part of me wasn't even a man right now, let alone a bad guy.

I never wanted to be a bad guy, not really. I never wanted it. I wanted the notoriety without paying the price. I wanted to float above, not been mired by the filth and stench of the dirty deeds.

This is what despair felt like and that's why I signed.

My life's blood.

My body.

My soul to be kept in an electronic wedge for five years.

The crazy thing is, as they led me through their underground facility into a place they called their imprint room, I thought I saw-

For a moment, for just a moment-

I thought I saw _him_.

Captain Hammer.

And at that moment I wondered if I might have just gone truly insane.

Because conspiracy theories aside, if Rossum did indeed associate with Captain Hammer - no, if they somehow controlled Captain Hammer - then the world was a good deal more messed up than I, or Dr Horrible, had ever suspected.

They stuck a needle in my arm and I felt groggy almost immediately. I settled down in a chair that looked, to all intents and purposes, like a dentist's chair. Like a psychiatrist's chair.

Like a bed.

My mind was playing tricks on me.

Like a grave.

I remembered standing in the rain with flowers that wilted by the second, looking down at the gravestone of the woman I wanted to be mine. I won't use the word love. Love implies reciprocation.

Like a… bird.

My mind, such that it was, faded fast.

I lay back in the chair-


End file.
